Creation of ICT Services to Solve Social Issues

4.1 Dealing with aging and labor force shortage

While job security is a pressing issue in the short term, the aging of society and declining birthrate clearly point to a future in which Japan will face a shortage in the labor force in the medium-to-long term. Therefore, it is important to enable people engaged in child rearing, senior people, and physically challenged people to take up jobs in various ways and thereby help to maintain the vigor of the nation’s economy. In this context, teleworking is expected to become a useful means of making personal life and work compatible with each other, i.e., achieving a good work-life balance.

A critical issue for teleworking is how to ensure sufficient security to prevent the leakage of information. A mechanism in which thin clients are used to prevent customer information from being left behind on client terminals has been developed (Fig. 5). And another mechanism that enables business applications to be accessed from anywhere by using SaaS or cloud computing has been implemented. Combined with mobile terminals, such a mechanism enables people at home, or on a visit to another site, to work in the same computing environment as in their office, with a high level of confidence in data security.

Fig. 5. New ways of working that exploit ICT.

The NTT Group offers a wide range of solutions that support teleworking and is also using them for its own employees.

4.2 Reinforcing medical and nursing care

In the field of health and nursing care, the use of ICT will lead to better medical services, such as rapid diagnosis and fewer errors. For example, electronic health records and personal health records can be shared not only within a single hospital but also among different hospitals via a network, while still ensuring security, However, Japan lags behind in this area compared with other industrialized countries.

Let us look at the situation in Tono, Iwate Prefecture, which suffers from a shortage of medical doctors (Fig. 6). The city has opened, in each community center, a room where citizens can measure and enter their health data (blood pressure, pedometer measurement, etc.) and receive health advice from local nurses. The room is connected via videophone and mobile phone to remote specialists who can give health instructions to the citizens.

Fig. 6. Example of the use of ICT for local cooperative health care.

In providing assistance to initiatives such as these, we find that simply providing a network to interconnect sites is inadequate and that it is important to care about how communications are conducted. These initiatives are bearing fruit. They have not only raised the quality of life of citizens, but also enabled community centers to serve as places of human interaction to help invigorate the community. It is important to understand the conditions and needs of each community and design a comprehensive and easy-to-use mechanism accordingly. This is the surest way to make ICT widely accepted.

4.3 Reinforcing administrative services

ICT can be used to seamlessly link various items of administrative information held by the national government and municipalities, thereby making it possible to provide one-stop processing in administrative procedures. If information held by the public sector is linked with that held by relevant institutions in the private sector, the government or municipalities can push important information to the public (Fig. 7).

Fig. 7. Use of ICT for administrative services.

Today, Japan lags behind in e-administration compared with the USA, Korea, and Scandinavian countries. For example, Korea has been working to harmonize the relevant rules, services, and ICT implementations to offer incentives to the public to use e-administration services.

In the case of the e-administration service introduced in Urasoe, Okinawa, Japan, business process reengineering and ICT were used to integrate various conventional systems. As a result, the processing for providing school expense subsidies, which conventionally took 20 steps, is now completed in only two steps, which makes the administrative service very quick to use. As this example shows, the advantages of e-administration include not only improving the efficiency of administrative work but also improving services to citizens.

Increasing attention is now being paid to cloud computing as a means for both the central government and municipalities to link their administrative work and provide e-administration services without possessing their own systems (Fig. 8). While cloud computing allows cost reductions and scalability, if it is to be applied to social infrastructures to provide public services, its reliability and security must be raised.

Fig. 8. Use of safe and secure clouds for e-administration services.

To respond to such needs, the NTT Group is undertaking R&D of a cloud computing infrastructure by combining clouds with high-quality networks, which are the forte of the Group, under the motto of “providing safe and secure clouds”.

4.4 Reinforcing education

As the aging of society and declining birthrate continue to advance in Japan, a country with scarce natural resources, it is important to strengthen education and develop human resources. We believe that it was the high level of education of the people that enabled Japan to catch up with Western powers relatively rapidly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, after opening its door to foreign countries in 1868, and quickly achieve economic recovery after being devastated by air raids in World War II. Today, however, Japan is experiencing a range of problems in all stages of education, from home education to primary schools, through universities, and on to training in enterprises.

ICT helps to improve the quality of education and expand educational opportunities (Fig. 9). As the saying goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words”. Students in a geography class, for example, can understand better and are more stimulated to study if they can view videos of the places they are learning about.

Fig. 9. Use of ICT in education.

ICT can also assist home education. For example, students at home can receive detailed lectures, using videos and audios on websites as many times as they want, can have exercises tuned to their weak points, and can motivate themselves by communicating with teachers and other students using blogs.

The NTT Group has started an Internet school called “N-Academy” as one of the application services exploiting broadband networks. This school features intense training by distinguished instructors. This has been made possible by the availability of bidirectional broadband communication. The school offers a wide range of courses, from cooking and flower arranging to sports and business-related subjects.

4.5 Protecting the global environment

Prime Minister Hatoyama has announced Japan’s target of reducing its CO₂ emissions by 25%. We believe that ICT services will play a vital role in two ways in the efforts to achieve this goal. The first is “Green by ICT”, which means contributing to CO₂ emissions reductions by society at large by promoting the use of ICT in various fields of human activity. The second is “Green of ICT”, which means reducing the CO₂ originating from ICT systems.

(1) Green by ICT

An example of ICT contributing to a reduction in electric power consumed by society at large is a smart grid (Fig. 10). By linking the electric power service and telecommunications, we can make the level of power consumption more visible, thus providing motivation to save power, and we can optimize the demand and supply of power, promote the use of renewable energy, and increase efficiency in the use of energy.

Fig. 10. Efficient use of energy: smart grid in Japan.

NTT is working on Home ICT, which connects many devices at home––not only information devices but also home and health appliances––to the network. The interconnection of these devices and appliances is expected to enhance the effectiveness of smart grids.

(2) Green of ICT

Let me introduce some examples of advanced R&D activities to reduce the power consumption of ICT equipment (Fig. 11).

Fig. 11. Use of innovative technology to reduce power consumption.

NTT is undertaking R&D of optical packet router technology with a view to developing a high-speed, high-capacity optical network in the future. The overall power consumption of the network can be dramatically reduced by reducing the amount of electrical processing in routers. In addition, we have succeeded in developing an optical bit memory, which uses photonic crystals. This ultracompact memory allows integration and operates at low power, so it is expected to pave the way for the development of practical optical memory devices in the future. R&D on a semiconductor device that computes using minute vibrations of a plate spring is also being undertaken. The technology for this device is expected to become a critical component technology for ultralow-power computers.

Another important power-saving effort being undertaken by the NTT Group is the initiative called “Green NTT”, which promotes the use of natural energy, especially photovoltaic power generation, to reduce the volume of CO₂ emitted in the course of business operations. As of February 1, 2010, about 120 buildings of the NTT Group in different parts of the country are generating a total of 3 MW using natural energy sources. The Group is working to raise this figure to 5 MW by 2012.

4.6 Making ICT safe and secure to use

So far I have described the advantages of using ICT. However, we should not forget that the use of ICT can involve serious risk at various levels, for example, cyber-terrorism launched at the national level, information leakage at the organizational level, and virus infections at the personal level. We believe that it is necessary to take a comprehensive approach to eliminating the downsides of ICT if we are to ensure the sound development of ICT.

On the individual and user side, education in cyber-ethics is important to ensure that people can use the Internet safely and securely. On the service provider side, filtering and anti-virus measures have already been implemented. It is due to our keen awareness of the importance of quality and security that the NTT Group is building the NGN. At the national and municipality level, it will be necessary to take wide-ranging initiatives to educate citizens and, in some cases, adopt relevant legal regulations. To ensure the development of ICT, it is essential to take measures that address various aspects of the issue, including technical, regulatory, and ethical aspects, and to develop a mechanism that enables users to fully benefit from ICT with a high level of confidence in security.